Yes, you know the image. You've seen it to the point of exhaustion. The text changes, but his posture and smile are the same. Who is that figure, and how it became a global meme? The right place to start is his name: He was called Joseph Ducreux, he became First Painter to Queen Marie Antoinette, survived the French Revolution, and almost all his portraits defied traditional structure, conveying to the fullest his own personality and that of those he painted.
A Painter to the Queen
Ducreux was born in the city of Nancy in June 1735. His father was a painter, and it didn't take long for him to follow the same career. He traveled to Paris in 1760 and became the only student of the pastelist and portraitist Maurice Quentin de La Tour. Nine years later he was sent to Vienna to portrait Marie Antoinette, who would become the wife of the then Dauphin and future king of France, Louis XVI. His service was so valued that he was named a baron and received the title of First Painter to the Queen, completely ignoring the hierarchy of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture.
The French Revolution led Ducreux to travel to London, and in 1793 he created the last portrait of King Louis XVI before his execution. The neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David was one of his main associates after his return to Paris, and thanks to him he was able to continue his career. Not much is known about his family, beyond the fact that he had several children, and his eldest daughter Rose-Adélaïde Ducreux also gained traction as a painter, musician, and composer.
The Meme Is Born
Joseph Ducreux died in 1802, but he made a strong comeback in 2009, when someone took a copy of "Portrait de l'artiste sous les traits d'un moqueur" and placed the phrase "Disregard Females, Acquire Currency" as an archaic reference to the line "F*ck Bitches, Get Money" from the song Money on my Mind by Lil Wayne (which in turn can be traced back to Get Money by Notorious B.I.G). From there, the Web did the rest. Ducreux's unorthodox portraits spread across the internet at full speed, creating thousands of variants of the original meme.
Source: Art History Project
